The present invention relates to an ultrasonic apparatus for use in medical diagnosis or in flaw detection, and more particularly to an ultrasonic diagnosis apparatus suitable for flexibly dealing with a change in specification of a probe.
Of most of conventional ultrasonic diagnosis apparatus, an ultrasonic probe is coupled to the apparatus via a removable connector. There is known an ultrasonic apparatus of the type that it selectively uses one of a plurality of probes such as a linear array type probe having transducer elements disposed linearly, a so-called convex array type probe having transducer elements disposed circularly and the like. Among those ultrasonic apparatus, there has been proposed an ultrasonic apparatus which can discriminate a probe connected thereto among those probes. One example of such an apparatus is shown in JP-A No. 60-222766 (1985). According to this apparatus, a store means such as a shift register for storing a code representative of a probe type is mounted on a probe, and the store means is accessed by the apparatus to read the code and discriminate the type of the probe actually connected thereto.
A main memory of such a conventional ultrasonic apparatus stores scanning and focusing control data for each type of a transducer, more specifically stores data regarding the selection of transducer elements and delay amounts of transmitting and receiving signals for respective transducer elements. When a code representative of a probe type is read from a store means provided on the probe, a memory area in the main memory corresponding to the read-out code is pointed out to read therefrom control data for the connected probe. Then the probe is controlled and, imaging operation are performed by using the control data. Such a conventional ultrasonic apparatus, however, have some problems: The number of probes which can be selectively used by the apparatus is limited depending on the capacity of a main memory. In addition, if the type of probes to be used is increased or modified, it is necessary to alter the content of the main memory.